Tag: simplification

The ubiquitous employee handbook is filled with rules, regulations, and descriptions of how employees are expected to behave. The larger the organization, the thicker the handbook. Handbooks and associated policies like this have been described as “corporate scar tissue.” Someone somewhere at sometime made a serious mistake, whether intentional or not, and so a policy was created to prevent that something from ever happening again. The same effect can be seen with many consumer products that have lengthy warning labels and manual pages stating things like “This toaster is not suitable as a flotation device in the event of a boating accident.”

In an effort to prevent a re-occurrence, the policies effectively limit – much like physical scar tissue – the ability of people within the organization to adapt, improvise, and innovate. They limit an employee’s range of motion within the organization’s solution space. In an effort to save the organization from human error and create the perfect business machine, excessive policies condemn the organization to a slow but certain death.

Anyone who has worked within a large organization recognizes this. For some, it’s a comfort. Knowing the rules. Knowing where the fences are. And knowing where to place blame. The less ambiguity around how a situation can be interpreted the better. For others, maybe after an attempt to change things, the environment becomes too stifling and they leave for greener, wider pastures.

Given enough time, the policies become the document of record for the organization’s culture. Any attempts to change the way work gets done within an organization that has deep scar tissue will have to confront Shalloway’s Corollary:

When development groups change how their development staff are organized, their current application architecture will work against them.

I’ve learned this corollary is not limited to software companies. In every case I’ve experienced, whether in a software company or not, the system will push back. Hard. Every Agile practitioner needs to know and respect this. Riding into work on a unicorn with a bag of rainbows and pixie dust is a gig that will not end well. At best, the organization will have made an incomplete effort at implementing Agile and “Frankenagile” will be roaming the halls – a collection of project management methodological parts that by themselves served a valuable purpose in a larger or different context, but have been stitched together to form a monster in Agile form only.

In a small company, particularly if they are working to create a software product, the monster may be small. So performing corrective surgery, while still a lot of work, is quite possible in a relatively short amount of time. For larger organizations, particularly those with deep roots in traditional project management, it can be a scary sized beast indeed. Something not to be trifled with, rather something that needs a well thought out strategy and plan of action.

It is the latter scenario I’d like to address in this series of posts (this being Part 1, the introduction) over the next several week. What I’d like to present is a method I’ve used quite successfully over the past 10+ years for assessing the extent to which Conway’s Law and Shalloway’s Corollary are in play. It is a method for determining both team and organization health within the larger management context. The extent to which Agile can be successfully implemented in an organization is dependent on how aware management, the Agile coach, and scrum masters are of the system dynamics driving organizational behavior.

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You go to see a movie with a friend. You sit side-by-side and watch the same movie projected on the screen. Afterward, in discussing the movie, you both disagree on the motives of the lead character and even quibble over the sequence of events in the movie you just watched together.

How is it that two people having just watched the same movie could come to different conclusions and even disagree over the sequence of events that – objectively speaking – could have only happened in one way?

It’s what brains do. Memory is imperfect and every one of us has a unique set of filters and lenses through which we view the world. At best, we have a mostly useful but distorted model of the world around us. Not everyone understands this. Perhaps most people don’t understand this. It’s far more common for people – especially smart people – to believe and behave as if their model of the world is 1) accurate and 2) shared with everybody else on the planet.

Which gets me to the notion of the user manuals we all carry around in our heads about OTHER people.

Imagine a tall stack of books, some thin others very thick. On the spine of each book is the name of someone you know. The book with your partner’s name on it is particularly thick. The book with the name of your favorite barista on the spine is quite a bit thinner. Each of these books represents a manual that you have written on how the other person is supposed to behave. Your partner, for example, should know what they’re supposed to be doing to seamlessly match your model of the world. And when they don’t follow the manual, there can be hell to pay.

Same for your coworkers, other family members, even acquaintances. The manual is right there in plain sight in your head. How could they not know that they’re supposed to return your phone call within 30 minutes? It’s right there in the manual!

It seems cartoonish. But play with this point of view for a few days. Notice how many things – both positive and negative – you project onto others that are based on your version of how they should be behaving. What expectations do you have, based on the manual you wrote, for how they’re supposed to behave?

Now ask yourself, in that big stack of manuals you’ve authored for how others’ brains should work, where is your manual? If you want to improve all your relationships, toss out all of those manuals and keep only one. The one with your name on the spine. Now focus on improving that one manual.

It appears mindfulness is…well…on a lot ofpeople’smindslately. I’ve seen this wave come and go twice before. This go around, however, will be propelled and amplified be the Internet. Will it come and go faster? Will there be a lasting and deeper revelation around mindfulness? I predict the former.

Mindfulness is simple and it’s hard. As the saying goes, mindfulness is not what you think. It was difficult when I first began practicing Rinzai Zen meditation and Aikido many years ago. It’s even more difficult in today’s instant information, instant gratification, and short attention span culture. The uninitiated are ill equipped for the journey.

With this latest mindfulness resurgence expect an amplified parasite wave of meditation teachers and mindfulness coaches. A Japanese Zen Master (Roshi, or “teacher”) I studied with years ago called them “popcorn roshis” – they pop up everywhere and have little substance. No surprise that this wave includes a plethora of mindfulness “popcorn apps.”

Spoiler alert: There are no apps for mindfulness. Attempting to develop mindfulness by using an app on a device that is arguably the single greatest disruptor of mindfulness is much like taking a pill to counteract the side effects of another pill in your quest for health. At a certain point, the pills are the problem. They’ve become the barrier to health.

The “mindfulness” apps that can be found look to be no different than thousands of other non-mindfulness apps offering timers, journaling, topical text, and progress tracking. What they all have in common is that they place your mindfulness practice in the same space as all the other mindfulness killing apps competing for your attention – email, phone, texts, social media, meeting reminders, battery low alarms, and all the other widgets that beep, ring, and buzz.

The way to practicing mindfulness is by the deliberate subtraction of distractions, not the addition of another collection of e-pills. The “killer app” for mindfulness is to kill the app. The act of powering off your smart phone for 30 minutes a day is in itself a powerful practice toward mindfulness. No timer needed. No reminder required. Let it be a random act. Be free! At least for 30 minutes or so.

Mental states like mindfulness, focus, and awareness are choices and don’t arise out of some serendipitous environmental convergence of whatever. They are uniquely human states. Relying on a device or machine to develop mindfulness is decidedly antithetical to the very state of mindfulness. Choosing to develop such mental states requires high quality mentors (I’ve had many) and deliberate practice – a practice that involves subtracting the things from your daily life that work against them.

“For if a person shifts their caution to their own reasoned choices and the acts of those choices, they will at the same time gain the will to avoid, but if they shift their caution away from their own reasoned choices to things not under their control, seeking to avoid what is controlled by others, they will then be agitated, fearful, and unstable.” – Epictetus, Discourses, 2.1.12